▸ The stack
The stack I actually ship on.
Honest list. Tools earn their spot by surviving paid customer work, not because they trended on Twitter. Daily drivers tagged ⚡ — used on customer work in the last 7 days.
▸ Last reviewed
May 2026 · revisit each quarter
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71
Tools in production
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8
Stack lanes
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19
Daily drivers ⚡
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12+
Years curating
Daily drivers.
▸ Used on customer work in the last 7 days
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▸ Backend
Laravel + PHP 8.3
Workhorse. Filament, Octane, Horizon, Pest. Every backend I ship.
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▸ AI
Anthropic Claude
Daily driver model. Claude Code for pairing, Claude API + MCP in product.
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▸ DevOps
Docker + Coolify + GH Actions
Self-hosted infra. Containers, CI/CD, zero-downtime deploys. No vendor lock-in.
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▸ Commerce
Shopify Plus
App Bridge, GraphQL Admin, Functions, Catalog API. Embedded apps + Plus theming.
Jump to a lane.
▸ 71 tools across 8 lanes
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Backend
Where the business logic lives
- Laravel 12 — Default framework
- PHP 8.3
- Octane (FrankenPHP) — Default · RoadRunner or Swoole when needed
- Horizon — Queue workers, retries, observability
- Filament v4 — Admin panels in hours, not weeks
- Livewire — Server-driven UI for admin tools
- Symfony — When PHP needs framework-free libraries
- Node.js + Express — For Shopify Remix / lightweight services
- Python — ML scripts, data pipelines, scraping
- TypeScript — Everywhere outside PHP
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AI engineering
Production-grade AI features
- Anthropic Claude API
- Claude Code — Pair programming + agent loops
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) — Tool exposure to agents
- Provider SDKs — Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral
- OpenAI — Embeddings + fallback model
- Cohere Rerank — Hybrid-search reranker
- Vector embeddings — OpenAI text-embedding-3-large
- Eval harness (Pest) — AI quality regressions
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Frontend
When the API hits a browser
- Vue 3 + Inertia.js — Default Laravel SPA
- React 19 — Shopify Remix admin apps
- Remix — Shopify app framework
- Astro — Static + content sites (this one)
- Nuxt.js — Heavy SSR projects
- Tailwind CSS v4
- shadcn/ui — Radix-based design system
- Polaris — Shopify admin UI kit
- Vite — Build tool, default
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Database & caching
Where the data actually lives
- PostgreSQL — Default datastore
- pgvector — Embeddings + hybrid search
- Redis — Cache, queues, locks
- MySQL — Legacy + Shopify Plus workloads
- Elasticsearch — Full-text + faceted search
- MongoDB — Doc store when justified
- Meilisearch — Self-hosted search alternative
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Shopify ecosystem
The commerce stack I ship apps on
- Shopify Plus
- Shopify GraphQL Admin API
- Shopify Catalog API — inferredFields + agentic SEO
- App Bridge — Embedded admin UI
- Polaris — Native admin look
- Shopify Functions — Discounts + cart transform
- Theme App Extensions — Storefront UI without theme edits
- Shopify Billing API — Subscriptions + dunning
- Webhooks + Bulk Ops — Data sync at scale
- Protected Customer Data — Scope approval workflow
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Cloud & DevOps
Where it runs in production
- Docker — Default packaging
- Coolify — Self-host all the things
- Laravel Forge — Managed deploys
- GitHub Actions — CI/CD pipelines
- GitLab CI/CD — Self-hosted runners
- Google Cloud (GCP) — Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, GCS
- AWS — S3, SES, CloudFront, ECS
- Cloudflare — CDN, R2, Workers, DNS
- Cloudflare Pages / Vercel — Static sites
- Nginx — Reverse proxy + tuning
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Testing & quality
Tests before optimism
- Pest PHP — Default test runner
- PHPUnit — Legacy + interop
- Jest / Vitest — JS / TS unit tests
- Cypress — E2E for admin UIs
- Playwright — Cross-browser flows
- PHPStan + Larastan — Static analysis, level max
- ESLint + Prettier — TS / JS formatting
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Tools & flow
Editor, terminal, brain
- Neovim + LazyVim — Daily editor
- PhpStorm — When refactoring large codebases
- Ghostty — Terminal
- Claude Code (CLI) — Agent pairing
- 1Password — Secrets + SSH
- Linear — Issue tracking
- Notion — Docs + spec writing
- Raycast — Launcher + workflows
- Figma — Design handoff
- Postman — API debugging
How I architect.
Methodologies and patterns I default to. Boring, opinionated, hard to argue with under pressure.
- Clean Architecture
- Domain-Driven Design
- SOLID
- Test-Driven Development
- Multi-tenant SaaS
- Event-Driven
- Microservices
- REST + GraphQL
- OAuth 2.0 + JWT
- Async-first
- Idempotency
- Observability
Honest curation.
New tools earn a slot only after shipping on customer work. List shrinks more than it grows — by design.
Currently learning
- FrankenPHP worker mode tuning at scale
- Bun runtime for Node services
- Postgres logical replication for tenant fan-out
- Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects
Recently dropped
- Heroku — cost / lock-in
- Algolia — Meilisearch caught up
- Vercel for Laravel apps — Coolify wins
- OpenAI as default model — Claude now is
Would not ship
- Vector-only RAG without reranker
- MongoDB as a primary OLTP store
- Hand-rolled auth in 2026
- Untested AI features in customer-facing flows
Want this stack on your project?
Same defaults, same speed. Fewer surprises in production.